from those mediaeval institutions are rare exceptions in Mohammedan
countries. Were Mohammedan women capable of the violent tactics of
suffragettes, they would rather try to blow up the houses of feminists than
those of the patrons of the old régime. The ordinary Mohammedan woman looks
upon the endeavour of her husband to induce her to partake freely in public
life as a want of consideration; it makes on her about the same impression
as that which a respectable woman in our society would receive from her
husband encouraging her to visit places generally frequented by people of
bad reputation. It is the girls' school that will awaken those sleeping
ones and so, slowly and gradually, prepare a better future, when the Moslim
woman will be the worthy companion of her husband and the intelligent
educator of her children. This will be due, then, neither to the Prophet's
Sunnah nor to the infallible Agreement of the Community of the first
centuries of Islâm, but to the irresistible power of the evolution of human
society, which is merciless to laws even of divine origin and transfers
them, when their time is come, from the treasury of everlasting goods to a
museum of antiquities.
Slavery, and in its consequence free intercourse of a man with his own
female slaves without any limitation as to their number, has also been
incorporated into the sacred law, and therefore has been placed on the
wrong side of the border that is to divide eternal things from temporal
ones. This should not be called a mediaeval institution; the most civilized
nations not having given it up before the middle of the nineteenth century.
The law of Islâm regulated the position of slaves with much equity, and
there is a great body of testimony from people who have spent a part of
their lives among Mohammedan nations which does justice to the benevolent
treatment which bondmen generally receive from their masters there. Besides
that, we are bound to state that in many Western countries or countries
under Western domination whole groups of the population live under
circumstances with which those of Mohammedan slavery may be compared to
advantage.
The only legal cause of slavery in Islâm is prisonership of war or birth
from slave parents. The captivity of enemies of Islâm has not at all
necessarily the effect of enslaving them; for the competent authorities
may dispose of them in any other way, also in the way prescribed by modern
international law or custom. In proportion to the realization of the
political ideal of Islâm the number of its enemies must diminish and the
possibilities of enslaving men must consequently decrease. Setting slaves
free is one of the most meritorious pious works, and, at the same time,
the regular atonement for certain transgressions of the sacred law. So,
according to Mohammedan principles, slavery is an institution destined
to disappear. When, in the last century, Mohammedan princes signed
international treaties for the suppression of slavery, from their point of
view this was a premature anticipation of a future political and social
development--a step which they felt obliged to take out of consideration
for the great powers. In Arabia, every effort of the Turkish Government to
put such international agreements into execution has thus far given rise to
popular sedition against the Ottoman authority. Therefore, the promulgation
of decrees of abolition was stopped; and slavery continued to exist. The
import of slaves from Africa has, in fact, considerably diminished; but I
am not quite sure of the proportional increase of the liberty which the
natives of that continent enjoy at home.
Slavery as well as polygamy is in a certain sense to Mohammedans a sacred
institution, being incorporated in their Holy Law; but the practice of
neither of the two institutions is indispensable to the integrity of Islâm.
All those antiquated institutions, if considered from the point of view of
modern international intercourse, are only a trifle in comparison with the
legal prescriptions of Islâm concerning the attitude of the Mohammedan
community against the parts of the world not yet subject to its authority,
"the Abode of War" as they are technically called. It is a principal duty
of the Khalif, or of the chiefs considered as his substitutes in different
countries, to avail themselves of every opportunity to extend by force the
dominion of Allah and His Messenger. With unsubdued unbelievers _peace_
is not _allowed_; a _truce_ for a period not exceeding ten years may be
concluded if the interest of Islâm requires it.
The chapters of the Mohammedan law on holy war and on the conditions on
which the submission of the adherents of tolerated religions is to be
accepted seem to be a foolish pretension if we consider them by the light
of the actual division of political power in the world. But here, too, to
understand is better than to ridicule. In the centuries in which the system
of Islâm acquired its maturity, such an aspiration after universal dominion
was not at all ridiculous; and many Christian states of the time were
far from reaching the Mohammedan standard of tolerance against heterodox
creeds. The delicate point is this, that the petrification or at least the
process of stiffening that has attacked the whole spiritual life of Islâm
since about 1000 A.D. makes its accommodation to the requirements of modern
intercourse a most difficult problem.
But it is not only the Mohammedan community that needed misfortune and
humiliation before it was able to appreciate liberty of conscience; or that
took a long time to digest those painful lessons of history. There
are still Christian Churches which accept religious liberty only in
circumstances that make supreme authority unattainable to them; and which,
elsewhere, would not disdain the use of material means to subdue spirits to
what they consider the absolute truth.
To judge such things with equity, we must remember that every man possessed
of a firm conviction of any kind is more or less a missionary; and the
belief in the possibility of winning souls by violence has many adherents
everywhere. One of my friends among the young-Turkish state officials,
who wished to persuade me of the perfect religious tolerance of Turkey of
today, concluded his argument by the following reflection: "Formerly men
used to behead each other for difference of opinion about the Hereafter.
Nowadays, praise be to Allah, we are permitted to believe what we like; but
people continue to kill each other for political or social dissension. That
is most pitiful indeed; for the weapons in use being more terrible and more
costly than before, mankind lacks the peace necessary to enjoy the liberty
of conscience it has acquired."
The truthful irony of these words need not prevent us from considering the
independence of spiritual life and the liberation of its development from
material compulsion as one of the greatest blessings of our civilization.
We feel urged by missionary zeal of the better kind to make the Mohammedan
world partake in its enjoyment. In the Turkish Empire, in Egypt, in many
Mohammedan countries under Western control, the progressive elements of
Moslim society spontaneously meet us half-way. But behind them are the
millions who firmly adhere to the old superstition and are supported by
the canonists, those faithful guardians of what the infallible Community
declared almost one thousand years ago to be the doctrine and rule of life
for all centuries to come. Will it ever prove possible to move in one
direction a body composed of such different elements, or will this body be
torn in pieces when the movement has become irresistible?
We have more than once pointed to the catholic character of orthodox Islâm.
In fact, the diversity of spiritual tendencies is not less in the Moslim
world than within the sphere of Christian influence; but in Islâm, apart
from the political schisms of the first centuries, that diversity has not
given rise to anything like the division of Christianity into sects. There
is a prophetic saying, related by Tradition, which later generations have
generally misunderstood to mean that the Mohammedan community would be
split into seventy-three different sects. Moslim heresiologists have been
induced by this prediction to fill up their lists of seventy-three numbers
with all sorts of names, many of which represent nothing but individual
opinions of more or less famous scholars on subordinate points of doctrine
or law. Almost ninety-five per cent. of all Mohammedans are indeed bound
together by a spiritual unity that may be compared with that of the Roman
Catholic Church, within whose walls there is also room for religious and
intellectual life of very different origin and tendency. In the sense of
broadness, Islâm has this advantage, that there is no generally recognized
palpable authority able to stop now and then the progress of modernism or
similar deviations from the trodden path with an imperative "Halt!" There
is no lack indeed of mutual accusation of heresy; but this remains without
serious consequences because of the absence of a high ecclesiastical
council competent to decide once for all. The political authorities, who
might be induced by fanatical theologians to settle disputes by violent
inquisitorial means, have been prevented for a long time from such
interference by more pressing affairs.
A knowledge alone of the orthodox system of Islâm, however complete, would
give us an even more inadequate idea of the actual world of catholic Islâm
than the notion we should acquire of the spiritual currents moving the
Roman Catholic world by merely studying the dogma and the canonical law of
the Church of Rome.
Nevertheless, the unity of Islamic thought is by no means a word void of
sense. The ideas of Mohammedan philosophers, borrowed for a great part from
Neoplatonism, the pantheism and the emanation theory of Mohammedan mystics
are certainly still further distant from the simplicity of Qorânic
religion than the orthodox dogmatics; but all those conceptions alike show
indubitable marks of having grown up on Mohammedan soil. In the works even
of those mystics who efface the limits between things human and divine,
who put Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism on the same line with the
revelation of Mohammed, and who are therefore duly anathematized by the
whole orthodox world, almost every page testifies to the relation of the
ideas enounced with Mohammedan civilization. Most of the treatises on
science, arts, or law written by Egyptian students for their doctor's
degree at European universities make no exception to this rule; the manner
in which these authors conceive the problems and strive for their solution
is, in a certain sense, in the broadest sense of course, Mohammedan. Thus,
if we speak of Mohammedan thought, civilization, spirit, we have to bear in
mind the great importance of the system which, almost unchanged, has been
delivered for about one thousand years by one generation of doctors of
Islâm to the other, although it has become ever more unfit to meet the
needs of the Community, on whose infallible Agreement it rests. But, at the
same time, we ought to consider that beside the agreement of canonists,
of dogmatists, and of mystics, there are a dozen more agreements, social,
political, popular, philosophical, and so on, and that however great may be
the influence of the doctors, who pretend to monopolize infallibility for
the opinions on which they agree, the real Agreement of Islâm is the least
common measure of all the agreements of the groups which make up the
Community.
It would require a large volume to review the principal currents of thought
pervading the Moslim world in our day; but a general notion may be acquired
by a rapid glance at two centres, geographically not far distant from each
other, but situated at the opposite poles of spiritual life: Mecca and
Cairo.
In Mecca yearly two or three hundred thousand Moslims from all parts of the
world come together to celebrate the hajj, that curious set of ceremonies
of pagan Arabian origin which Mohammed has incorporated into his religion,
a durable survival that in Islâm makes an impression as singular as that
of jumping processions in Christianity. Mohammed never could have foreseen
that the consequence of his concession to deeply rooted Arabic custom
would be that in future centuries Chinese, Malays, Indians, Tatars, Turks,
Egyptians, Berbers, and negroes would meet on this barren desert soil and
carry home profound impressions of the international significance of Islâm.
Still more important is the fact that from all those countries young people
settle here for years to devote themselves to the study of the sacred
science. From the second to the tenth month of the Mohammedan lunar year,
the Haram, _i.e._, the mosque, which is an open place with the Ka'bah in
its midst and surrounded by large roofed galleries, has free room enough
between the hours of public service to allow of a dozen or more circles of
students sitting down around their professors to listen to as many lectures
on different subjects, generally delivered in a very loud voice. Arabic
grammar and style, prosody, logic, and other preparatory branches, the
sacred trivium; canonic law, dogmatics, and mysticism, and, for the more
advanced, exegesis of Qorân and Tradition and some other branches of
supererogation, are taught here in the mediaeval way from mediaeval
text-books or from more modern compilations reproducing their contents and
completing them more or less by treating modern questions according to the
same methods.
It is now almost thirty years since I lived the life of a Meccan student
during one university year, after having become familiar with the matter
taught by the professors of the temple of Mecca, the Haram, by privately
studying it, so that I could freely use all my time in observing the
mentality of people learning those things not for curiosity, but in order
to acquire the only true direction for their life in this world and the
salvation of their souls in the world to come. For a modern man there could
hardly be a better opportunity imagined for getting a true vision of the
Middle Ages than is offered to the Orientalist by a few months' stay in
the Holy City of Islâm. In countries like China, Tibet, or India there
are spheres of spiritual life which present to us still more interesting
material for comparative study of religions than that of Mecca, because
they are so much more distant from our own; but, just on that account,
the Western student would not be able to adapt his mind to their mental
atmospheres as he may do in Mecca. No one would think for one moment of
considering Confucianism, Hinduism, or Buddhism as specially akin to
Christianity, whereas Islâm has been treated by some historians of the
Christian Church as belonging to the heretical offspring of the Christian
religion. In fact, if we are able to abstract ourselves for a moment from
all dogmatic prejudice and to become a Meccan with the Meccans, one of the
"neighbours of Allah," as they call themselves, we feel in their temple,
the Haram, as if we were conversing with our ancestors of five or six
centuries ago. Here scholasticism with a rabbinical tint forms the great
attraction to the minds of thousands of intellectually highly gifted men of
all ages.
The most important lectures are delivered during the forenoon and in the
evening. A walk, at one of those hours, through the square and under the
colonnades of the mosque, with ears opened to all sides, will enable you to
get a general idea of the objects of mental exercise of this international
assembly. Here you may find a sheikh of pure Arab descent explaining to his
audience, composed of white Syrians or Circassians, of brown and yellow
Abyssinians and Egyptians, of negroes, Chinese, and Malays, the probable
and improbable legal consequences of marriage contracts, not excepting
those between men and genii; there a negro scholar is explaining the
ontological evidence of the existence of a Creator and the logical
necessity of His having twenty qualities, inseparable from, but not
identical with, His essence; in the midst of another circle a learned
_muftî_ of indeterminably mixed extraction demonstrates to his pupils from
the standard work of al-Ghazâlí the absolute vanity of law and doctrine to
those whose hearts are not purified from every attachment to the world.
Most of the branches of Mohammedan learning are represented within the
walls of this temple by more or less famous scholars; and still there are a
great number of private lectures delivered at home by professors who do not
like to be disturbed by the unavoidable noise in the mosque, which during
the whole day serves as a meeting place for friends or business men, as an
exercise hall for Qorân reciters, and even as a passage for people going
from one part of the town to the other.
In order to complete your mediaeval dream with a scene from daily life, you
have only to leave the mosque by the Bâb Dereybah, one of its twenty-two
gates, where you may see human merchandise exhibited for sale by the
slave-brokers, and then to have a glance, outside the wall, at a camel
caravan, bringing firewood and vegetables into the town, led by Beduins
whose outward appearance has as little changed as their minds since the day
when Mohammed began here to preach the Word of Allah.
To the greater part of the world represented by this international
exhibition of Islâm, as a modern Musulman writer calls it, our modern
world, with all its problems, its emotions, its learning and science,
hardly exists. On the other hand, the average modern man does not
understand much more of the mental life of the two hundred millions to whom
the barren Mecca has become the great centre. In former days, other centres
were much more important, although Mecca has always been the goal of
pilgrimage and the cherished abode of many learned men. Many capitals of
Islâm offered the students an easier life and better accommodations for
their studies; while in Mecca four months of the year are devoted to the
foreign guests of Allah, by attending to whose various needs all Meccans
gain their livelihood. For centuries Cairo has stood unrivalled as a seat
of Mohammedan learning of every kind; and even now the Uaram of Mecca is
not to be compared to the Azhar-mosque as regards the number and the fame
of its professors and the variety of branches cultivated.
In the last half-century, however, the ancient repute of the Egyptian
metropolis has suffered a good deal from the enormous increase of European
influence in the land of the Pharaohs; the effects of which have made
themselves felt even in the Azhar. Modern programs and methods of
instruction have been adopted; and, what is still worse, modernism itself,
favoured by the late Muftî Muhammed Abduh, has made its entrance into the
sacred lecture-halls, which until a few years ago seemed inaccessible to
the slightest deviation from the decrees of the Infallible Agreement of the
Community. Strenuous efforts have been made by eminent scholars to liberate
Islâm from the chains of the authority of the past ages on the basis of
independent interpretation of the Qorân; not in the way of the Wahhâbî
reformers, who tried a century before to restore the institutions of
Mohammed's time in their original purity, but on the contrary with the
object of adapting Islâm by all means in their power to the requirements of
modern life.
Official protection of the bold innovators prevented their conservative
opponents from casting them out of the Azhar, but the assent to their
doctrines was more enthusiastic outside its walls than inside. The ever
more numerous adherents of modern thought in Egypt do not generally proceed
from the ranks of the Azhar students, nor do they generally care very much
in their later life for reforming the methods prevailing there, although
they may be inclined to applaud the efforts of the modernists. To the
intellectuals of the higher classes the Azhar has ceased to offer great
attraction; if it were not for the important funds (_wagf_) for the
benefit of professors and students, the numbers of both classes would have
diminished much more than is already the case, and the faithful cultivators
of mediaeval Mohammedan science would prefer to live in Mecca, free from
Western influence and control. Even as it is, the predilection of foreign
students of law and theology is turning more and more towards Mecca.
As one of the numerous interesting specimens of the mental development
effected in Egypt in the last years, I may mention a book that appeared in
Cairo two years ago[1], containing a description of the present Khedive's
pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, performed two years before. The author
evidently possesses a good deal of the scholastic learning to be gathered
in the Azhar and no European erudition in the stricter sense of the word.
In an introductory chapter he gives a summary of the geography and history
of the Arabian peninsula, describes the Hijâz in a more detailed manner,
and in his very elaborate account of the journey, on which he accompanied
his princely master, the topography of the holy cities, the peculiarities
of their inhabitants and of the foreign visitors, the political
institutions, and the social conditions are treated almost as fully and
accurately as we could desire from the hand of the most accomplished
European scholar. The work is illustrated by good maps and plans and by a
great number of excellent photographs expressly taken for this purpose by
the Khedive's order. The author intersperses his account with many witty
remarks as well as serious reflections on religious and political topics,
thus making it very readable to those of us who are familiar with the
Arabic language. He adorns his description of the holy places and of the
pilgrimage-rites with the unctuous phrases used in handbooks for the hajji,
and he does not disturb the mind of the pious reader by any historical
criticism of the traditions connected with the House of Allah, the Black
Stone, and the other sanctuaries, but he loses no opportunity to show his
dislike of all superstition; sometimes, as if to prevent Western readers
from indulging in mockery, he compares Meccan rites or customs with
superstitious practices current amongst Jews or Christians of today.
[Footnote 1: _Ar-rihlah al-Hijaziyyah_, by Muhammed Labib al-Batanunf, 2d
edition, Cairo, 1329 Hijrah.]
This book, at whose contents many a Meccan scholar of the old style will
shake his head and exclaim: "We seek refuge near Allah from Satan, the
cursed!" has been adopted by the Egyptian Department of Public Instruction
as a reading-book for the schools.
What surprised me more than anything else was the author's quoting as his
predecessors in the description of Mecca and Medina, Burckhardt, Burton,
and myself, and his sending me, although personally unacquainted with him,
a presentation copy with a flattering dedication. This author and his book
would have been impossible in the Moslim world not more than thirty years
ago. In Egypt such a man is nowadays already considered as one of those
more conservative moderns, who prefer the rationalistic explanation of the
Azhar lore to putting it aside altogether. Within the Azhar, his book is
sure to meet with hearty approval from the followers of Muhammed Abduh, but
not less hearty disapproval from the opponents of modernism who make up the
majority of the professors as well as of the students.